22nd Jan 2012 : Yay, this is my first blog post for the year 2012. The year began with a successful completion of another round of Google Code-In , a program to encourage pre-university students to participate in open source. Having completed google summer of code with GNOME recently , I was really curious to mentor for GCI for my friend GNOME. Andre Klapper ,the man whom I troubled a lot initially, for melange system bugged me. Thanks Andre:-)
I mentored for the following tasks : -

• Design a chart to categorize the GCompris Activities : Walter designed a pretty interesting chart to categorize the gcompris activites using GNOME's diagram creation tool dia and Inkscape.


• Add SVG Image implementation example to PyGoocanvas code documentation : Isham added a SVG (Scalar Vector Graphics) image implementation example to the code documentation of PyGoocanvas.


• Add documentation for installation of gcompris from source : Timofey prepared a documentation for installation of GCompris on linux and added whatever was missing in the already existing manual.

A kid (/me) mentoring another kid was the best part :P It was immense fun to communicate with the feelings of kids and watch their growing enthusiasm towards Open Source.

Hail Open Source !

I am late here, but about time. Yes, I am again building stuff and doing a new startup. Those of you who don’t know what I am working on, check out RingAd. At RingAd, we are building world’s first ringtone based advertisement network. I decided to work on this idea, because I liked that what [...]

Well How should I start, quite perplexed & yet don’t know the reason.

As they say, “There are two most important days in your life, when you were born & the other when you discover why you were born?” I think when you stay silent whether you stays for a minute or for hours, it’s not some general random thoughts that pops up into your mind.

“It’s personal choice, startups are hard.” And I was like damn I really am not in right position to comment/say anything. Well I never actually started anything so awesome.

“Startups are doomed to fail, it’s a risk, big risk.” I was like nothing is more fun than this, a great learning source, you get fame too & all that glitters. But it’s actually other way round.

“How much you work is not about you are increasing it’s success chance, but it’s about how much you are reducing it’s failure chance.”, he added. So does that mean, “You have to work to icnrease success chance to reduce failure chance, so is’nt it same?” “Actually not, 90% chances are that your startup will fail, now all you gotta do is to reduce this percentage.” Being naive is not bad thing but thinking that 90% chances are that you will succeed & working for 10% to increase that chances, that’s wrong. He was quite right actually. I never seriously thought about it.

Another thing that lies under all this but utterly important motivation. “Motivation to make a successful business”, but is it really a motivation? This looks pretty much like a goal, but it’s not actually. In other words, the thing that should “motivate is to see successful business some day, not that parents will be happy, friends will cheer for you, get fame & rich etc etc this is greed, change your motive.” That doesn’t mean this couldn’t be movtivation for someone, but not in real world a greed could be source of motivation. If you are working with someone that’s key point.

“You know my friend life’s a roller coaster with ups & downs.” Roller coaster is fun always but life’s not, moreover roller coasters’ ups & downs doesn’t effect other’s life but in real your ups & downs may do so. Well does that mean “it’s a different roller coaster with strings attached.” You get vibration at other end, if some unusual activity happens at this end. Day dreaming is somewhat different than keeping your motivation constant & focused. You may end up thinking grapes are sour or can be consistent to achieve your ultimate desire.

And I still don’t understand what would it take to get anything real out of my life, or it is just all about sticking to your goal that should also be your motivation. So does that mean if motivation & goal are different, you are dead? How it is different from self-actualization? When you try to convert those negative 90% into positive 90% but still just following remaining 10%, can it be desribed as motivation or when you are hungry & do what it takes to diminish your hunger? Motivation is not about being optimistic or be confused with emotion.“Motivation” to do something that arises from the intent of I can do something to “make the world a better place” is beautiful.

The motivation to do a startup has to be right. Motivation is whether you are ready to commit whatever it takes for an unknown time whatever be the result. Fire-fly burning in a fire, itself is a live/dead example of motivation, I think.

So this all started with a conversation between me & him.

Dude, I better hurry.

Genuine things arise from the cutting edge of imitation, you find your existence when there are certain limitations and unsolved problems, but to reach where you know solutions are ; is a very long journey indeed, that is some point where you will stand, have been through all sort of tricks and knowledge used so far.

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Suddenly I am seeing lots of events happening all over India, in which you are supposed to make a startup over a weekend. Initially I liked the idea that it’s perfect for people in jobs and have idea to work upon, they can jump in, try if it clicks and decide to carry on. But [...]

I have started to believe that Internet at large and social networks in particular can solve any problem world have. I was thinking about why I get so many proposals from people who want to make social networks, every other day. Some of them are actually interesting, like creating community of plantation awareness, literacy and [...]

8th Nov 2011 : It was tremendous fun to attend my first Fedora event FUDCon 2011 at COEP College ,Pune. A day before the event , I reached Pune at midnight and my eyes got hold on two guys wearing geeky tshirts .This was how I recognized Fudcon speakers Arun SAG and Vaidik Kapoor. Day one commenced with Jared Smith 's inspiring keynote on the vision of fedora. He spoke about the underlying concept behind core values of Fedora community : Freedom, Friends, Features, First. I must say it was utmost frolic to meet awesome contributors from the community and attend interesting sessions.The kind of adrenaline rush I observed in COEP students and other delegates for various talks and workshops cheered aloud the success of FUDCon.

During night I spent some time preparing slides and code scripts for my talk. Day two, as per the schedule, I conducted a session on Cute hacks with PyGoocanvas .It was my first talk and I am glad it all began with FUDCon. I have uploaded the contents of my presentation and demo code on git : https://github.com/srish/FUDCon-2011. FUDPub was the most awaited event of the evening. Its plethora of fun to watch geeks dancing and cracking jokes.Rahul Sundaram is the most humorous geek I have ever met till now:P Being pure vegetarian and teetotaler, I had a good company with Aditya :D Third day was even more exciting, and a real barcamp feeling. Suchakra conducted a hackathon on Qt for Embedded devices. I was amazed to see so many enthusiastic girls from COEP and we squatted together to discuss how to crack Google Summer of Code and beauty of GNOME Women Internship Program


Day ended with a cake cutting ceremony and the auditorium echoed : Three Cheers for FUDCon. I say FUD ,you say CON. FUDCON! At last ,I express my immense gratitude to team fedora for sponsoring my travel and making my stay at Pune the most memorable one ever. Hats off to Fedora Community. You guys rock and deserve a big round of applause:-)
FUDCon will always remind me of those baby pink bathroom slippers stolen from my room :P

Links :
http://fudcon.in/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLEZzXUVT50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIlUwysK9iQ
http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album72?page=1

मुझ में जो मेरा है, बस वो मेरा रहे हर वक्त मुझे बस तेरी ही खोज रहे, तुझसे मिलने की चाहत ही बस चाहत रहे जो मैं जियूं तो ऐसे जियूं, आज दिवाली तो कल होली रहे. दिन जो गुजरे तो ऐसे गुजरें , चुपचाप रहूँ तो खुद से बोलूं बोलू तो जो है सो [...]

Latest updates on development of Le-Chal shoe can be accessed here.

I think the notion of using a contact us form is so 20th century, this is one of those redundant element from web 1.0 that is still into existence, but with no reason.  A masked email id, at your contacts page is enough. All other filtering, categorization etc. can be done at your part, then [...]

Here is an auto-rickshaw repair process I regularly notice during my visit to Kanakpura, Bangalore.

• An image of the interaction while the repair process is on:

Image1

• An image of the parts that are laid down during assembly and disassembly.

The multimodal interaction of the repairguy with the engine above is natural, rich and can't get better and we're trying to replicate this through gestures and modalities such as touch/haptics etc. This is the holy grail as I feel.
Image3 The interfaces around us are shifting hastily from CLI to more graphic and natural user interfaces. Where the graphic aspect helps bring the visual nature of the real world closer the the user's cognition, the NUI aspect makes the story fluid.

We're surrounded by objects that are means of day-to-day interaction in our lives. Image 3 (by Bret Victor )probably explains the importance of our interaction with them, and proves to be my inspiration for future work with touchable/holdable/fee-able/tangible interfaces.

Quoting Vitor below:

"Okay then, how do we manipulate things? As it turns out, our fingers have an incredibly rich and expressive repertoire, and we improvise from it constantly without the slightest thought. In each of these pictures, pay attention to the positions of all the fingers, what's applying pressure against what, and how the weight of the object is balanced"